Another day, another massacre

I woke up this morning and was soon in tears.

Overnight there’d been a shooting at a school in Texas. At the time of writing, 14 kids were dead. Kids aged between 7 and 9 years old.

Holy shit. And you feel like mutely and impotently screaming into the wind… STOP THIS. But for the most part, the sound doesn’t even transmit from person to person in the US, much less from thousands of miles away.

I don’t know why this particular massacre struck so hard. Apparently there have been more than 200 massacres already this year in the US, and we are only 144 days into the year.

It’s the tears that surprised me. I don’t know why this one hit hard. I guess I was thinking of my son when he was in that age group (only four years ago) and I tried to put my headspace into what these parents in America are going through.

And we all do that. We try to imagine what people are going through when we hear horror stories. But we don’t allow ourselves to dig too deeply. With all of the sadness in the world, it would be overwhelming to try and absorb it all. A bit like T S Eliot’s infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.

And to get by, somewhere in the survival part of our brain, while genuinely feeling for all of these suffering humans that are so much like us, like Bono we say “tonight thank God it’s them, instead of me.” It’s easier to keep at arm’s length when it’s happening to someone else.

And because you want to focus on joy and bringing happiness to the lives around you, and because it’s happening over there where things are far less immediate or confrontational, you let your mind go to other things and limit the impact of the horror. And you should. Because there are always horror stories and dwelling on this shit will gut you.

But for some reason, these 14 kids remain in my head. And I want them to.

Now and again it’s important to try and walk in those shoes that you never wish to walk in. And it’s only in walking in these shoes, whether they are your own or ones you are borrowing, that those that blindly lust after guns and seek to minimize their awful byproducts may finally see the light.

So what if it did happen to you…

In their shoes

It’s early in the morning on a school day in YOURTOWN. As we head into winter and the nights get colder and the morning set frosty, it’s a struggle to get them out of bed, and today they made it a pitched battle. Like they did yesterday. And the day before that.

Breakfast awaits them, which they drag out while watching something on TV. As they do that you pack their lunch. There’s a cheese and tomato sandwich, piece of fruit, flavoured milk and a small chocolate and you debate which bits will be swapped, which will be thrown away, which will be eaten and which will come home untouched.

Getting dressed is also dragged out… and you almost forgot that it’s sports day so you have to pack the sports clothes. Apparently it’s the wrong backpack, which makes you a bad parent somehow.

You get to school, almost on time, and the day goes on.

It’s recess (they call it play lunch) and class has come out after maths which they thought would never end.

If they are thinking about anything of significance it’s what they’ll play on their gaming console when they get home, or watch on Netflix… or about footy practice, singing rehearsals, dance classes, and 50 other things that aren’t school.

Playing in the playground, they don’t notice just another grownup walking around until he pulls out a gun, fires his first shot and a child lays dead.

They all scream. They all cry.

Some run but most can’t even move. Can’t even. Fucking. Move.

To a child, their last thought is they want mum or dad to come and hold them and make them safe. Every last one of them. But they hope in vain.

As the gun turns to them each experiences an overpowering fear like they’ve never felt before. They’ll never feel it again. They’ll never experience anything again. Their final moments will remain frozen in aspic and unchanged for all time… filled with fear and horror and incomprehension.

The first shots are heard instantly by people who live or work near the school. For those who didn’t hear them, there are soon sirens. And you’re used to hearing sirnesso it doesn’t register at first, but there are so many of them…screaming sirens … and they’re heading in the direction of…. YOUR SCHOOL.

Suddenly you can’t breathe, can’t speak and you rush to your car as YOU feel that horror at what might have happened.

Now it’s on Facebook, on the radio, and you’re getting messages but you haven’t got time to answer them… you have to get to school immediately.

The police have set up barricades… you stop the car in the middle of the street and run… sprint towards the school.

You are pulled up by the police who make no exceptions, along with the other sobbing, howling parents with no idea what exactly has transpired yet, but fearing the absolute worst.

You don’t yet know that of a class of 28, fully half of the class is now dead. Half of the parents are about to go through a hell they’d never imagined, and even the other half will live with a guilty relief that will always plague them, and a sympathy towards the other parents that they can never discuss.

Word seeps out on the numbers killed and the number of survivors. You will hate yourself forever for wishing it was someone else’s kid just this once, Lord, but you do. To no avail. Your child is lost.

The bodies are transported away and you don’t even get to cradle the body one last time of the one who embodied more love than you knew you had within you.

There are funerals. YOURTOWN has changed forever. But you have changed irrevocably. From the first moment home when you see the unmade bed from this morning, to when you pass by gaming consoles, sort through their clothes. And it’s not months, it’s years.

And even when you think you’re improving, you remember with a cold certainty the fear and horror that made up your child’s last moments, their utter confusion as to what was happening, and their unfulfilled desire to be comforted by you. And it brings you undone again.

Their life is gone. Yours is irreparably damaged. The whole community is forever changed, and for the worse.

And so it goes…

And this, according to the news story, plays out every day in the US. Sometimes with kids at school, sometimes with mostly black shoppers at a convenience store, sometimes with fans at a country music concert, sometimes at a gay dance concert.

And through it all… the second amendment remains grotesquely defended and steadfastly in place.

I don’t get gun culture. My dad was a farmer and we had a .22 a 303 a 4-10 shotgun and an air rifle. I liked using guns and was a pretty good shot.

Years after the farm was sold, following a massacre in Tasmania, the government told everyone without a license to hand in their guns. I knew losing the farm had been tough on dad and thought he’d struggle to hand back one of the last symbolic remnants of the farm and I looked to him for guidance.

He said, paraphrasing, hand them in. We have no use for them any more.

And around Australia, that’s what happened. I guess the difference is we aren’t inculcated from birth into a gun culture. Australians aren’t told from the moment they’re born the great lie that they have a right to rifles. Some jack up and complain, there’ll always be some, but most are ok with it.

Some have licences as professional shooters, sports shooters, police etc, and good luck to them. But by and large you don’t need a gun. It’s not that there is a blanket ban on guns, and of course we still have gun violence, but nothing like the scale as the US.

Second amendment supporters mention the need for guns lest the government become a dictatorship or such like. And they are saying the cost to human lives, often children’s lives, in these massacres is a cost they are willing to accept.

The new Top Gun movie came out this week and I’m reminded by a line in the first movie. Paraphrasing, these gun lovers are writing checks that children’s bodies are having to pay for.

There was a song by Sting some years ago called “Do the Russians love their children too.” Do the Americans?

The Democrats, nominally the “restrict guns” party, faffs about with the types of guns people can obtain while missing the entire point.

There is NO need for most people to have a gun. There definitely should be NO RIGHT to own a gun and the second amendment is a dated bit of rhetoric made for another time and never meant to be a rallying cry for dickheads that hold gun ownership as symbolically sacrosanct.

It’s time to get rid of it completely.

Someone (not me) needs to start a movement, with a clever hashtag. #MeToo made a difference. #BlackLivesMatter. Call it what you like, but the movement has to be about completely repealing the second amendment. No more of this beating around the bush bullshit.

It will be heavily contested, almost a civil war, but avoidance isn’t working.

Too many people are dying.

Too many kids are dying.

The cost is just too high.

It’s time for more than mutely and impotently yelling into the wind.

But I better round this up here. There’s another US massacre due any minute now and I don’t want to get in the way